Our school St David’s is situated on Kilmore Road Artane in the parish of Ardlea Road on the north side of Dublin city. The pupils of our school come from the surrounding districts of Kilmore, Coolock, Bonnybrook, Kilmore West, Clonshough, Priorswood, Ayrefield, Beaumont and Riverside. All the buildings in the area are quite recent. Most of the houses have been built in the last thirty years. There are no old building still standing except St John’s Church in Coolock. Coolock itself is a very historic place but there are no old buildings still in use.
My teachers say that when they first started in the school on July first 1968 the school was almost completely in the country. They remember corn being cut in the fields beside the school. Now days there is little or no green to be seen. The whole area has been completely built up.
On the Malahide Road near Kinsealy there is a very old church called St Doolochs. This is a very ancient church and we considered adopting it but when we saw the Casino we decided that this would be our project. Most of us had seen the Casino from the upstairs of the bus as we went into town. From the road it looked very small. One day our teacher brought the class to visit it and once we saw it we were amazed. None of us had ever visited it before. We found that we could walk from the school to the Casino in less than twenty minutes. You could say that it is local. Our teacher has quite an amount of material about the building and its owner and architect.
The class before us started the work and our teacher had hoped that we would have the benefit if their work but unfortunately our class room was burned in a fire last February and all of our research and work went up in flames. We spent the remainder of the school year on temporary accommodation in the Artane Beaumont Leisure Centre and we did not get the time to do any work on the project. We are still in temporary accommodation in old prefabs but when Peter Pearson wrote to us in September to tell us that near the projects would be exhibited in the first week of November we got down to really serious work. We had fantastic help and encouragement from Lindis who called out to visit us and help us with our model.
We immediately visited the Casino and soon got to know Doreen O’ Donovan the guide from the Office of Public Works. She has been of great assistance to us. We would also like to thank Mrs Mason from the OPW who also helped us. We learned a lot about history, art, building and architecture (particularly classical architecture and Georgian buildings) from the project. A special word of thanks to John the caretaker at the Casino who showed us some of the secrets of the Casino not usually seen by the public. Peter Pearson visited our school and spoke to us about the beauty of our city. He showed us pictures of beautiful buildings that we pass every day without even noticing them. He made us proud of our city.
We also decided to put out project on the internet because when we were researching for information on the Casino we could not find anything about it on the internet and we felt that we should give the rest of the world a chance to know about this beautiful building. Our school was the first school in Ireland to have a web site, thanks to Colm Grealy of Ireland on Line who is a past pupil of our school.